Looking Fabulous For the End of the World, Vancouver-Style

by Linda Solomon For The Vancouver Observer
Forest Ethics Strategic Director Tzeporah Berman and Fairview MLA Gregor Robertson were looking fabulous on the green carpet  with celebrities last week at the Vancouver premier of Leonardo DiCaprio's new environmental documentary, "The 11th Hour," a film that describes the end of the human species, before offering a few suggestions for saving our collective creature ass.

Berman is one of 50 spokespeople interviewed in the film, which depicts global warming as a time bomb with a few seconds left before it blows.  

Other spokespeople included Canadian environmental leader David Suzuki and others too numerous to mention, but thankfully including Kenyan Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai.
 
In a flick distressingly empty of voices other than those of white male talking heads, Berman's  fourteen seconds is like a blessed gust of clean forest air.

The film blames big oil corporations' grip on the American political system for creating an insurmountable impediment to making relatively simple changes that could cool the earth's rising temperature.  

By pouring billions of dollars into the campaigns of US elected officials, fossil fuel corporations turn America's leaders into obedient (if not cute) corporate pets, the film suggests.  

Pointing out how quickly the United States was able to mobilize and defeat Germany and Japan during World War II, once it decided to, the good old boy enviros and scientists in the 11th Hour seem to believe that if America would return to its former ability to pass non partisan public policy legislation, things would turn around fast.   
 
In a talk after the movie, Robertson described the last six years of British Columbian politics as an “environmental Dark Age.”
 
"We are supposedly the number one city in the world," Robertson told the theatre filled with environmentalists and entertainment industry people who had received special invitations to the event, which was sponsored by The Endswell Foundation, Happy Planet Juice, and Hollyhock Workshop and Retreat Centre.  "Many people around the world have no idea of what’s really going on here."
 
He described pork barrel projects that have damaged BC’s environment and a government that talks green and walks greenback.
 
"It's hard to separate the wheat from the chafe,” Berman added.  “Everybody’s green these days.”  

Berman was pictured the week before   with Paris Hilton in the Globe and Mail at the film's Hollywood premier.

Berman  told  The Vancouver Observer how she had a moment to decide whether or not to allow herself to be photographed with Hilton, whom she believed was trying to redeem her  public image after a jail bout.  In a split second, Berman reflected on her  career as an activist dedicated to first saving BC's first growth forest in Clayquot Sound from logging and later focusing on preserving the remainder of the world's rain forest, her campaigns against  companies such as Victoria Secrets whose catalogues were all made of first growth Canadian forest, until Berman took them on, etc.  She beat Victoria Secrets with an embarrassing ad campaign and brought them to the bargaining table, where they agreed to stop using old growth for catalogues they knew people were hardly looking at and quickly tossing into the trash.

But she couldn't beat the fact that she lives in a celebrity driven culture.  Despite the apparent absurdity of the situation, Berman agreed to the photograph.  

In it, Berman stands awkwardly beside a preening Paris, resigned to the fact that a second with Hilton could mean  as much to advancing the goals of Forest Ethics as years spent hammering away at substantive issues in political forums.
 
The event drew a number of apparent stars, primarily from the television industry.  But nobody watching the stunning young women pose for Vancouver's distressingly mild paparazzi seemed to know who the purported fabulous people were.    
 
As cameras flashed and filmed those posing on the “green carpet”, the many environmental workers standing  around watching asked each other if they recognized the subjects.  

"I don't have a clue who they are," said a   woman wearing glasses and work clothes, who said she worked for the Endswell Foundation.
 
Others wondered if the people being photographed really were !!real!! stars.
 
“Could we, like, go have our pictures taken?” asked a tall woman with a pregnancy beginning to show.
 
“No,” said her friend.  “See that woman standing at the corner. She’s got a list.  She’s calling people up.”

"Oh, yeah," her friend said.  "The ones dressed to kill.  They're from the film industry."

"You gotta look good for the end of the world," the other woman remarked, shaking her head.

There was a party afterwards at Yaletown's Century where gossip columnists mixed with activists and  idealists and cynics and all toasted to the world would last at least another day, if not a generation.

Photo  by Brian Powell for The Vancouver Observer.  MLA Gregor Robertson and Forest Ethics Strategic Director Tzeporah Berman at the 11th Hour Vancouver Premier

(Read More Great Stories Like This at www.thevancouverobserver.com)